Not until 31 May here in France, I'm always afraid I'll miss the day at home so usually try to schedule it into my email calendar account at the start of the year. Saves me from being in everybodys bad books as happened the first year when I hadn't realized the days were celebrated on different dates in other countries. I'm not sure I was ever *really* forgiven for missing it...

Sadly I no longer have to worry about it.

Thanks to the timely reminder here I actually managed to make a card for my mother, for a change. It's gone off in the post today, so with a little luck will arrive on time :



It's terribly dull here, so the photo is pretty rubbish, but never mind.

She will love it.

Iznogoud went walkabout recently and was missing for over a week, to everyone's dismay. The kids were so happy when he reappeared that they asked (read: told) me to scrap a page featuring him. It's all pink and girly, but I'm sure he won't mind

Aww, I am glad he is back, and yes he does deserve a page.

As requested by Ren, here is a pen made in the past few days. I have actually made one since but this one is nicer in my opinion.

I love your pens. Just sayin'.

This is a piece of parchment which I ompleted today, I started it on a course that I did a few weeks back and only got it out again the other day. I am not overthrilled with it, glad to get it over and done with.

A group of items made using a pattern that I am rather fond of.

Great colours. is it individual beads, Sue or can you get 'sheets' of them? Looks mind boggling.

The boy is home for Easter school holidays and he brought home every card I had sent him through the term and put them on his bedside table. It was a bit of a warm and fuzzy moment when I saw them.

Awwww that's lovely, Jill! They appreciate us more than we think, eh?

All individual beads stitched together to form a piece which is then wrapped around a cylinder then stitched together. A pen has 1170 beads and takes a minimum of five hours to complete, and that is working at it non-stop so allowing for breaks it can take longer. The pen in this pattern actually took far more than ten hours to complete, it was a real pain until I bought some software which will allow me to print out patterns in text form, now I would be able to do it in about six hours or so.

That is lovely that Conor really appreciates your cards to him.

I actually found some time in my busy timetable to attend a craft class yesterday. This is the page I made.

Edited to add: this is an example of a type of scrapbooking called French or European scrapbooking by a company called AZZA which originated in Belgium.

How very professional that looks Carol. Lovely!

Very Halloween-y, Carole, and what a lot of work! "Azza"-scrapbooking requires a lot of precision, and a good choice of colour palette/papers. You nailed it!

Thank you for your kind words. It wasn't actually meant to look "Halloweeny" but the colours do lend themselves to that.

Actually, I got the impression the teacher wasn't totally thrilled with it because it wasn't purely done with AZZA products - I made use of paper scraps that I already had, and my cat silhouette and alphabet dies (none of which are their products). The only AZZA product I used was the stencil for the shapes.

But everybody in the class (most of whom were cat-lovers) liked it.

While it might be technically considered a hybrid, it's still a gorgeous page, and that's really all that counts, don't you think?

Absolutely!

It is great Carole.

Love it!

I did this as a break from the pens etc.

Amazing!

That is stunning!

Beautiful!